Roundup: September 3, 2021
Recent Publications
Don E. Albrecht (Western Rural Development Center) published COVID-19 in Rural America: Impacts of Politics and Disadvantage in Rural Sociology. This fascinating article traces the distribution of COVID-19 from predominantly urban to increasingly rural counties over time. According to Albrecht:
Multi-variate regression analysis found that political views were the most important variable explaining per capita COVID-19 cases, while measures of disadvantage were the best predictors of COVID-19 deaths. Counties with high proportions of Trump voters had higher per capita cases, and in nonmetro areas, these counties had higher death rates.
Opportunity Zones, 1031 Exchanges, and Universal Housing Vouchers by Brandon M. Weiss (Law, American University) is forthcoming in the California Law Review and available now on SSRN. Although not specifically rural-focused, Weiss addresses important policy issues impacting housing access and affordability more generally.
Leslie Richardson (National Park Service) and Lynne Lewis (Economics, Bates College) published Getting to Know You: Individual Animals, Wildlife Webcams, and Willingness to Pay for Brown Bear Preservation in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Alex Blanchette (Anthropology, Tufts) published Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Jan Dutkiewicz (Postdoctoral Fellow, Swiss National Science Foundation) also reviewed this piece in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
I Will Follow? Authoritarian Populism, Past and Present by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (International Development Studies, Trent University) is out in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Jonathan R. McFadden (Economics, University of Oklahoma), Alicia Rosburg (Economics, University Northern Iowa), and Eric Njuki (ERS) published Information Inputs and Technical Efficiency in Midwest Corn Production: Evidence from Farmers’ Use of Yield and Soil Maps in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Julian M. Alston (Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC-Davis), Philip G. Pardey (Applied Economics, Minnesota), and Xudong Rao (Agribusiness and Applied Economics, North Dakota State) published Payoffs to a Half Century of CGIAR Research in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Alec P. Rhodes (Sociology, Ohio State) published Student Debt and Geographic Disadvantage: Disparities by Rural, Suburban, and Urban Background in Rural Sociology.
News & Commentary
Grant Schulte and David Pitt published an article on rural population loss and ranch and farm labor in USA Today.
The New Yorker published Is It Time to Break Up Big Ag? by Dan Kaufman.
H. Claire Brown published a look at herbicides entitled Attack of the Superweeds in The New York Times Magazine.
Alysia Santo and R.G. Dunlop published an article for The Marshall Project that investigates police shootings in rural America.
The Economist published The American West is Drying Up analyzing the impact of climate change and policy on the American West.
Paul Theobald published a look at rural school consolidation policy in For More Than a Century, Policymakers Have Mishandled Rural Schools in The Washington Post.
The August results of Creighton University’s Rural Mainstreet Index have been released and are available here.
A partnership of the Nebraska College of Law and the Center on Children, Families and the Law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The Children’s Justice Attorney Education program has received the Springboard Prize for Child Welfare and will use these funds to expand qualified attorney access in rural Nebraska. More information is available here.
Events & Recordings
Michele Statz (Family Medicine and BioBehavioral Health, University of Minnesota Medical School) recently discussed rural access to justice on the Just Us and the Law podcast. The episode can be found here. As a reminder, we previously published a reflection on Michele’s work written by one of the northern Minnesota judges she has intereviewed, and you can find it here.
Agri-Pulse TV recently published an interview with Ferd Hoefner on infrastructure and reconciliation bills. The recording is available here.